Synopses & Reviews

Synopsis

Excerpt from A Quarter-Century of English Literature: 1880-1905

Let us look at these facts in another light, at the same time making some sort of rude effort to classify them. At the close of 1880, the six great poets who had long made illustrious the Victorian age of English song were all living and all vocal. Within sixteen years, five of the six had passed away, leaving Mr. Swinburne the sole surviving representative of that great period. Less than this number of years had sufficed to extinguish the entire con stellation of our greater American poets, not one of their fellowship being left us tokeep the torch alight. With George Eliot there died the last of the great English novelists, for it could not be soberly urged that she has found a true successor. Two novelists of unquestionably distinguished achievement - Mr. Thomas Hardy and Sir George Meredith - still live to remind us of the great age of English fiction, but their following is an esoteric cult in com parison with the wide acclaim accorded to Dickens and Thackeray. The twentieth century, moreover, finds us as bereft of prophets as of novelists and poets. The wisest of our time must seem but minor prophets when we contrast their utterances with the burning eloquence of Carlyle and Ruskin, or even with the persuasive accents of Arnold and Newman. Truly, the living word as it comes to the ears of our youth of to-day is but a feeble and ineffectual stimulus to noble thought and action in comparison with the call that rang in the ears of the rising generation a quarter of a century ago.

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